Hi Folks,

This is one more entry in the list of things that we have been working upon on your feedback. We have updated the compiler versions for some of languages that have been long pending. Python and Go being the most wanted changes. Below is the list of the 4 languages that have been upgraded to their latest version.

Hopefully your favourite language is in this list.

Till we bring more interesting news to you, which wont be too long, good bye.

-Tojo,
Team CodeChef.

Hey there folks! The June Cook Off is now officially over and thanks to that, we have had some really exciting 175 odd minutes of anxiety and fun. So let’s get down to the highlights of this stimulating Cook Off. Believe me, there are quite a few.

First off, let’s begin with the winners. Well, there is hardly any surprise in that quarter. It is Gennady Korotkevich who is the man of the moment, yet again. He gained a hold at the top place from the very start, maintained it throughout and almost sealed the deal just 75 minutes into the contest when he solved all the five problems of the June Cook Off. At the second place we have another short contest star, lyrically. Once he too set himself up firmly at the second place, it was a fight for the third position between the other participants. You bet that was a fierce one!

The battle for the third place was between quite a few players. We saw KADR, yeputons, al13n, anton_lunyov and EgorK fight it out for that coveted place till the end. There were so many quick changes at the third spot that it was quite difficult to guess who would secure it till the very last. Finally it was KADR who finished the Cook Off at the third spot. Congratulations to our top three finishers

With this let’s have a quick look at the Global Top Ten of the June Cook Off.

1.)  gennady.korotkevich
2.)  lyrically
3.)  KADR
4.)  yeputons
5.)  al13n
6.)  anton_lunyov
7.)  EgorK
8.)  subscriber
9.)  artem_rakhov
10.) kunyavskiy

Worth mentioning here is the come-back of EgorK, our second place short contest ranker, for a Cook Off after some time. We hope to see him more often in the future It was also encouraging to see manan make India’s presence felt on the rank list at the 15^th place. With a little more perseverance, we will hopefully see more Indians in the top rankings soon.

The June Cook Off saw a good amount of participation from the coding community, with the final number of users exceeding 860! The number of Submissions too stands at a healthy figure of over 3300. Here is the stats table for the June Cook Off.

Talking of the problems, one can say that the contest had an interesting range. Closing the Tweets was the first to be solved amongst the lot. It was also the problem with the highest number of successful submissions. It was distantly followed by Connecting Soldiers . The tougher ones of the lot were Golden Trees , Alien Chefs and Gifts at Olympics . All in all it was a varied set of problems, with something for everyone. We hope you had a gala time with the problem set

Without doubt the credit for putting up such an interesting set of problems goes to our problem setter and tester. We wholeheartedly appreciate the efforts of Anil Kishore and Hiroto Sekido , the setter and tester for this contest. Their dedication and coordination ensured that CodeChef could come up with yet another riveting batch of problems. I would also like to thank Anil Kishore for doubling up as our editorialist for this contest and take out extra time to come up with lucid and effective editorials. He has been one of our finest editorial writer for quite some time now. Do check out the editorials for the June Cook Off here and please let us know your thoughts on the new editorials. Your valuable response will be appreciated and acted upon.

It looked like a good CookOff with the highest participation ever seen over the last 23 editions! But amidst all this fanfare, let us also accept that we goofed up and goofed up badly. We had been eager to put up this long awaited feature for quite some time now. As per my tech team – “This new feature required a high query processing time and though we had tested this out, we did not consider the query load that our DB faces during a live contest. The change done to the DB engine was not well analyzed and in the excitement to give the feature to you quickly, we forgot to do the basics. A performance test was compromised.”

Needless to say, it resulted in a major embarrassment for us when we had to take the site down during a live contest to revert back the changes. But as soon as they realized the goof up, they acted fast enough to bring things back to normal. At the end of it, we know that you will forgive us and we sincerely hope that you enjoyed the problems and will love our new feature.

I guess it’s time to sign off now. Don’t forget to look out for news regarding the forthcoming July Long Contest from our kitchen. And yeah keep those fingers sharp and agile. Till we return with the new contest problems, keep them busy with the ones from the June Cook Off which are now available in our Practice Section .

As always, we ask you for your valuable feedback. Feel free to let us know any suggestion, big or small, that you may have for the CodeChef team.

Till we meet next time, it’s me saying “Goodbye people!”.

-Ankita

Team CodeChef

Hello Everyone,

Codechef.com & discuss.codechef.com are up and working now. You can start making your submissions on Codechef and can start posting your queries on discuss.codechef.com

We apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Regards,
Abhijeet,
Team Codechef.

We will be taking the site offline today (June 16, 2012) for scheduled maintenance at 11:00 PM (IST). The site will be offline for a duration of an hour. Please be patient and keep watching this space on what is going to come.

-Abhijeet,
Team CodeChef.

Hello people! We have come to the end of yet another long contest and it is that happy time again when we share the exciting happenings of the event with you. Yeah, and announce the winners too. So here we go.

The June Long Contest ends to our delight with a surprise winner at the top spot. Make way for acube, first time winner of any of our long contests. Very close on his heels we have old timer ACRush in the second place with a score of 9.978. Congratulations to both of them!

The rankings board was one interesting place to watch out for during this challenge. The top spots saw a lot of activity with a number of contenders fighting it out for coding glory. Our final winner of the challenge acube made a late entry on the leader board, only to zap up all the way to the summit. He claimed the top spot from ACRush, who till late seemed all set to finish the June Long Contest as its winner. Fighting it out till the end, ACRush finally settled in for a close second place behind acube.

Other contenders for the sweet spots at the top were pasin300058, triplem and gennady; all of them finishing in the Top Five. The tussle between them only made the June Long Contest a nail biting thrill till the very end. Amongst the Indians, it was balakrishnan_v and kriateive who came out tops, with balakrishnan_v also featuring at the 10^th spot in the Global Rankings. Kudos to all of them!

On that note, let us check out the ranking lists for the contest.

Global:

1.) acube
2.) ACRush
3.) pasin30055
4.) triplem
5.) gennady.korotkevich
6.) sankear
7.) zlobober
8.) al13n
9.) Fdg
10.) EgorK

Indian:

1.) balakrishnan_v
2.) kriateive
3.) shadow
4.) pulkit
5.) pragrame
6.) sharatiitr
7.) thecodegame
8.) sharky
9.) ritesh_gupta
10.) moody
11.) calc_saransh
12.) dudechandan123
13.) javadecoder
14.) logic_max
15.) pratikmoona
15.) rishabhm
15.) rizwanhudda
15.) rockaustin2k6
19.) akash4983
20.) vineetonrole

Apart from the eventful ranking lists, there was another unique reason which kept us thoroughly excited during the challenge. What a thrill it was for us when only six days into the contest we broke our previous record of participation from the community! From there on the numbers just kept climbing up, as did our anticipation. Below are the stats for the unprecedented participation and the number of correct submissions the June Long contest witnessed.

Wow! Those are some good numbers there. Indeed it was immensely satisfying for our chefs to see their creations being lapped up with such enthusiasm. So let’s put our hands together for the problem setters of the June Long Contest: Vitaliv Herasymiv, Shilp Gupta, IstvanNagy, Namit Shetty, Shanjingbo, Hiroto Sekido and Kaushik Iska. I also take this opportunity to welcome on board our first time problem setters IstvanNagy and Namit Shetty. Hope to see a lot of new and exciting concoctions from them in the future contests. Equally worth mentioning is the effort of Anton Lunyov, our problem tester. Thanks to his seamless coordination with a team of relatively new problem setters, and his absolute obsession for perfection, CodeChef could come up with one of its most versatile and testing set of problems.

With so much already on their plates, we thought it was only fair on our part to try and make the jobs of our setters and testers less demanding. That, combined with the long standing request of the coding community for better editorials, led us to finally revamp our editorials. Speaking of which, let me introduce everyone to the new member we have taken on board. Enter Vamasi Kavala, our very first editorialist! He went to work straightaway and has helped us come up with the new improved editorials for the June Long Contest.

Not so surprisingly, the editorials have become one of the most discussed about topics for this contest. There was a slight delay in publishing them precisely because of the extra effort that our team was putting into them. As of now we have published 9 editorials. The last one will be out there soon. Here are the links to the already published ones. Over the next few days we would be fine-tuning them even more. Starting from this long contest itself, you can locate the editorials on the discuss page at the link: http://discuss.com/problems/<PROBLEMCODE>, where you substitute “PROBLEMCODE” with an actual problem code. You can also check out the same under the tag “editorials”.

We are super excited about your views on our all new improved editorials  and eagerly await your feedback. Do let us know what you think of them and anything else that you think will make CodeChef a better experience for everyone.

Well, I guess that is it for now. We promise to return soon with more head-scratchers with the monthly Cookoff. You can keep your coding skills in top gear till then by revisiting the problems of the June Long Contest, which are now available in the practice section to try out at convenience.

Time to sign-off for now. Don’t fret; we will be back real soon with more exciting stuff. Till then keep an eye out on this space for more news from the kitchen.

-Ankita

Team CodeChef